A Q&A with Kyla Williams Tate, Cook County's Director of Digital Equity and our partner on the IMPACT Small Grants Program
By Tyra Bosnic
Kyla Williams Tate, Director of Digital Equity for Cook County in the Office of President Toni Preckwinkle
Last fall, City Bureau kicked off a partnership with Cook County to design and implement the Digital Equity IMPACT Small Grants Program, a groundbreaking new initiative that leverages community storytelling and engagement to promote digital inclusion.
In an increasingly digital world, technology is always shaping our ability to inform ourselves and one another, and to take action: most people read and share news on a digital device. Public bodies commonly share meeting information online. From real-time public health announcements to updates about your neighborhood on social media, being able to use a device with an internet connection is playing a more central role in how people engage in civic life.
Our approaches to addressing gaps in information access are strengthened when we capture the full scope of how access to digital tools impacts people’s lives and the conditions around them. Research typically quantifies access to the internet and technology with figures like the number of households with a computer, the rate of expanding access to high-speed internet, and digital literacy rates. While data is important for understanding the digital divide, stories give people the opportunity to share in their own words how digital access impacts their ability to find resources or make changes in their communities.
Kyla Williams Tate, the Director of Digital Equity for Cook County in the Office of President Toni Preckwinkle, collaborated with City Bureau to harness the potential of both data and storytelling. Our work together is based in the Cook County Digital Equity Action Plan that outlines four main areas of focus informed by community conversations: access to high-quality internet and devices, the confidence and skills to navigate the internet to improve one’s quality of life, safe internet practices, and physical infrastructure (like cables, towers and data centers) that support service for every community.
Addressing these interconnected needs requires an ecosystem of relationships with community members, organizations, and civic institutions. To foster the relationships that make the ecosystem stronger, we co-created the Digital Equity IMPACT Small Grants Program in partnership with Cook County. This initiative supports organizations in sharing stories from their digital equity work, connecting residents to resources, and empowering community members to advocate for the digital tools that improve their lives and strengthen civic participation.
Over the past nine months, City Bureau has worked closely with Kyla and her team member, Digital Equity Coordinator Mauricio Jimenez, to launch the Digital Equity IMPACT Small Grants Program and welcome our first-ever grantee cohort. We convened grantees to learn more about the digital equity stories they want to share as they provide training, tools, and support to community members across Suburban Cook County. Most recently, we are working with grantees on developing data collection practices to track how storytelling can drive digital inclusion.
Kyla’s career has focused on building a movement that centers community voices in digital equity efforts, and she was recently recognized as a 2025 Digital Equity Champion by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance for her committed leadership in this space. From participating in one of the first think tanks focused on using technology to improve civic conditions in Chicago to playing a key role in developing the framework that became City Bureau's national Documenters program, Kyla's vision for the Digital Equity IMPACT Small Grants Program was years in the making: “I've got to capture the magic in the bottle for a second time in a row.”
We talked with Kyla about her background at the intersection of civics and digital equity, her connections to City Bureau, and what's next for the IMPACT Small Grants Program—edited for length and clarity.
The last few months, we've worked together to launch a new grant program, select our inaugural grantees and welcome them at our first convening. But the story of this work and your leadership in it goes even deeper. Can we take a step back and hear how you came to this work and what planted the seeds for this program?
I have been doing digital inclusion work—both formally and informally—for close to 30 years. When we go back 30 years ago, it wasn't called digital inclusion. Digital equity didn't exist as a concept, as a philosophy of practice, but certainly the needs were there when we talk about early entry into tech and people having the ability to even type and understand what the QWERTY keyboard was—and what the functions of any kind of device was.
I am the go-to in my circle of family and friends for all things technology, even though I did not major in technology. I am a social worker who just happens to do technology, which I think is a good marriage of instincts and industry training. Because I've been that go-to person, moving into a role with the city of Chicago and helping them during the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program was a natural transition for me. And storytelling is my superpower. If we fast forward from the city of Chicago work, I took a break and then moved into the Cook County work that I've been in since 2022.
I wrote down my three-year plan for myself and this work, and storytelling was something that I presented on that plan. Creating a grant program that married digital inclusion with storytelling was a priority, because even when I did this work 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago—there's still an information gap around the body of work, the opportunities that exist, and how we are more civic minded. How we help to bring about more civic consciousness around this body of work is through the stories, because then people can see themselves in the stories, see their family members, see their colleagues. And if it's a good story, they can reflect on it and figure out how they can incorporate it into their day to day.
I am hoping through the creation of the IMPACT Small Grants Program that we are going to capture many, many stories that help to raise consciousness, raise awareness, inspire action, and create a new corps of digital equity champions. Because we need all hands, hearts and minds on board in order to advance this work.
Tyra Bosnic, Senior Manager of Grants and Public Partnerships, leads a welcome workshop for Digital Equity IMPACT grantees at the City Bureau office.
You touched on this idea of people-forward programming, and that is really at the heart of City Bureau's work. Can you say more about that?
I worked for an amazing organization called the Smart Chicago Collaborative. I just want to take a moment to really highlight how important the Smart Chicago Collaborative was to the city of Chicago and to the nation. At the time, we were one of the first, I would say, “thought shops”—one of those think tanks—that really focused on civic technology.
I love research, and so I align with that. But then there's also the kooky, innovative ideas that need to merge with the academic spaces to help reach real people. Smart Chicago Collaborative was really a training ground for me to figure out how to bring together people-forward programming—allowing them to use their lived experience as a way to partner with government and others to say: “This is what I need…I don't have a name for it; I may not be able to describe it fully, but I think I need to be able to do this. So how can we do that? How can you help me, or partner with me to do that?” That training on civic technology for the public good has walked with me forward, and I'm carrying that in this work that I'm currently doing.
There’s some wonderful thought leaders that don't even consider themselves to be part of our digital equity ecosystem that have influenced me. I do my best to make sure that I attribute all of those good ideas, and we roll that all into this space that we exist in. And it's all organized under our current Digital Equity Action plan, which is probably one of the more people-forward digital equity plans in the country.
We’ve seen the many points of alignment in our work, but people may not know your connection to City Bureau. Why choose us as a partner?
When I was at Smart Chicago Collaborative, we were doing a three-day learning symposium and we were trying to determine what we could do to ensure that the process was open. We were trying to figure out how we would document what was happening at that symposium.
I had said to [Smart Chicago Collaborative’s Executive Director] Dan O’Neil, “I just really wish there was some way that we could have folks like reporters document what's happening in the rooms in a non-biased way. Not creating an edited story for consumption, but just writing down everything that happened, who said what.” Then we could share that documentation broadly with the world so that they could shape it in the way that they wanted to, and share other stories around this work.
Dan said, “I think that there's a place for this, because there's something happening at City Bureau where they're getting into the space of documenting public meetings.” We met with [City Bureau co-founder] Andrea Hart, and then the rest was history.
The Documenters program was born, and we helped to support that program. We were able to send some substantial resources to City Bureau on the way out of the organization sunsetting. Because y'all are brilliant and amazing in this space, City Bureau took [the framework], made it your own, added to it, and just grew it into the national phenomenon that it is. So when I was thinking about how I was going to introduce the idea of digital inclusion and storytelling, I said, ”I gotta capture the magic in the bottle for a second time in a row,” because I knew of an organization who understands how important community voices are to the process.
I wanted to ensure that we were going to create a training ground for our digital inclusion champions to learn how to be in this new media space of information sharing and story sharing. So I came to City Bureau to see if it's something we could collaborate on and grow together as a movement—not just for Cook County, but across the many communities that do this work and have struggled with how to articulate it publicly, how to share it with their community members, so this could be a pilot project for us to start a whole new community of practice around storytelling for this particular work.
Something that really strikes us about our work so far is that we've positioned storytelling to bring clarity to and literacy to these structural issues—using storytelling as a real public tool. Where do you hope to see our impacts a year from now?
I am hopeful that we will have between 30 and 45 grantees, depending on where the dollars are and what we're able to fundraise for. That would stand up a strong core of storytellers in suburban Cook County.
I am also hoping that we'll be able to expand to the city of Chicago. We can't tell a full Cook County story without including our Chicago residents. So philanthropy, if you're reading this, call me! There's already interest across the nation in the work. We announced the awardees in December and we already have a list of people who are like, “Are you forming a network? Can we get in the network? We can set standards around how we tell these stories and set some examples, and create tool kits so that we are able to have replication and continue to keep digital inclusion in the forefront of folks' minds.
If I could put a foundation on this, we really want folks to think even deeper around what this means for your community and your particular industry. Maybe you're not someone that's in the educational space—digital equity still touches your home. It still touches your social life in some way. It still touches your job in some way. We want to create this storytelling corps of impact so that we can think more broadly and even more specifically—or hyper locally—about this work as a way to help actually advance it. I haven't stopped saying some of the same stuff I said 10, 20, 30 years ago. I want to tell a different story.
To learn more about how you can strengthen Cook County’s digital equity ecosystem with us, reach out to tyra@citybureau.org.